Tuesday, July 01, 2014

Frameline: The Third One

On the penultimate night of the Frameline film festival, I checked out The Third One, an Argentinian film about a sexual encounter between a university student & a couple in a long-term relationship. I hear that threeway relationships are all the rage (A friend says they're called "thruples"), so I figured it would at least be educational.

We first meet the 3 men through their computer screens, as they flirt online. The young man is invited over for dinner, & the rest of the movie charts their evening together. The movie is brightly lit & pleasantly affirming in tone. We get to know the characters a bit more deeply during an extended dinner conversation with a fresh, improvisatory feel, composed of 2 long takes. In fact, the movie's takes are all long, & I counted only 17 shots in the whole thing. The main event is an extended sex scene, which is explicit even though it never shows anything below the waist.

One scene had unreadable subtitles, with white letters appearing against a bright yellow shirt. There should also probably have been subtitles for the math lecture the student sits through in the last scene, as it seemed to relate to the movie's theme. Like every other screening I attended at Frameline, this one was filled to the rafters. I was amused that my 2 movie companions had completely opposite assessments of the film.

2 comments:

OCD perhaps? When I noticed that the director was not cutting away during the dinner scene, I realized that everything was in long continuous takes & that I could probably account for all of them by jotting down a word or 2 whenever I saw a cut. And then I could show off my attentiveness by mentioning it here :)

I just happen to like long takes, so I usually notice when it's been a while since the last edit. Russian Ark kept me on the edge of my seat, I can tell you!